Retro-Squared: Tomb Of The Aztecs

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This is interesting: a “3D realtime raytraced dungeon crawl”, called Tomb Of The Aztecs. It’s both a classic randomly-generated Roguelike, and also a rudimentary FPS reminiscent of the early days of textured 3D gaming. All of which disguises the fact that this is some very clever design indeed: auto-generated maps that allow the raytraced 3D screen to spring forth. It’s the kind of thing that big old commercial games couldn’t even conceive of doing in the current climate. It’s a shame it’s not a slightly more sophisticated dungeon-crawler (not much in the way of loot or stats), but it’s a fun concept piece. And it does suggest an angle of attack other ASCII heroes might one day take. [Via the all-seeing Indiegames.]

Edit- I played it. My favourite quote from the summary above is “It’s the kind of thing that big old commercial games couldn’t even conceive of doing in the current climate.” to which I would reply, good thing too.

Game’s bit boring, but engine being realtime raytracer is mighty interesting. I remember being all “wow” when watching DOS demos with realtime raytracers (i.e. Transgression/MFX). Neat stuff, even if rendered (no pun intended) pointless by modern GPUs now. Works smooth on my Intel E2180@2,8Ghz, by the way.

It also apparently has stolen sprites from Final Fantasy or Chrono Trigger or some Squaresoft game.

But anyway, this kind of reminds me of Might and Magic VI. What ever happened to the first-person party-based RPG on the PC anyway? I’d sacrifice at least four goats to get another legit Might and Magic game. That or someone redoing Might and Magic IX so it was actually functional.

I would love more party-based first-person RPGs, too. Are there even any indie developers making games like that? The last I remember seeing was The Devil Whiskey. It’s sad that the Nintendo DS has a couple of decent games in the genre, and we don’t see any on the PC.

The Japanese are the only ones who still crank out classic Western RPGs, ironically enough. Etrian Odyssey 1 & 2, despite their anime aesthetics, are hella hard dungeon crawls (you even have to draw your own map using the bottom screen of the DS)!

The recent Dark Spire, also for the NDS, is even more hardcore, AD&D stuff like less AC being better, limited spells per day, and even an option to play in wireframe mode ala Wizardry. In fact it’s pretty much a direct Wizardry clone, down to the nearly identical spell lists and endgame comprised entirely of spamming the equivalent of Tiltowait because you’re facing multiple packs of many monsters.

Wizardy 8 was good fun, yeah. Shame there won’t be more like it.. the Etrian Odysseys weren’t bad, but got a bit dull after a while. Well, at least I felt that way. Still got plenty of hours out of each mind you.